Hla Oo's Blog

I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Investing in emerging markets is like
watching the tides without the moon as a guide. Capital flows in and out in
surges, and woe to the country that gets caught with bad policies when the tide
suddenly goes out. Argentina has been getting that re-education of late, and
now Turkey is watching capital flee for safer climes.

Turkey’s lira fell as much as 5% on Wednesday, and it’s lost more than a
fifth of its value this year, adding to a long decline that is forcing extreme
monetary measures to compensate. Much of the blame lies with President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, as Turkey has been running a current-account deficit that is on
trend to exceed 6% of GDP. Turkey has been growing rapidly but the growth has
been heavily financed by dollar-denominated investment.

Meanwhile, Mr. Erdogan has been beating
the central bank like it’s Syria’s Bashar Assad. In Ankara this month, he
called high interest rates “both the mother and father of all evils.” Investors
took this to mean he’s exerting political control over Turkey’s central bank
even as inflation has reached nearly 11%.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Our Trump will not allow Iran to keep on
terrorizing the people of Iran.

What’s in America’s New Tough Plan for
Iran? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out the U.S.’s new tough stance on
Iran, emphasizing the Trump administration’s post-nuclear-deal approach to the
Islamic Republic is nothing less than what the global consensus was before the
deal was signed.

In 2012, then-president Obama said, “The deal we’ll accept is [that]
they end their nuclear program.” In 2013, the French foreign minister said he
was wary of being sucked into a “con game” re: Iranian uranium enrichment In
2015, then-secretary of state John Kerry said, “We don’t recognize the right
[of Iran] to enrich [uranium].”

The deal has been exposed as a failure
on these points (as well as many others) and the U.S. decided to pull out. So
what in store for the mullahs now? Here’s the basis of the U.S. plan:

1. Sanctions are going back in full
effect and new ones are coming.

Last week, the U.S.sanctioned the head
of Iran’s central bank and other entities funneling money to the IRGC Quds
Force, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. “This is just the
beginning,” Pompeo said. “Iran will be forced to make a choice: Either fight to
keep its economy off life support at home or keep squandering precious wealth
on fights abroad. It will not have the resources to do both.”

Monday, May 21, 2018

With Turkey’s central bank sitting on
the sidelines observing a currency meltdown and double-digit inflation, one
brokerage is looking for help from a higher power.

“God help Turkey,” Istanbul-based broker Alnus Yatirim said in the
sign-off to its morning note to clients on Monday. “We’re faced with a central
bank that is watching the market when it needs to lead and direct it.”

The brokerage predicted that the TRY
could fall to 4.58 per dollar by the end of this week - or rather the start as
it is already there now, give or take - and 4.75 next week.

The market is testing whether the
central bank’s verbal interventions are a bluff or not, Alnus said. Without
policy action, the damage is likely to spiral, it said, citing the $222 billion
of net debt held by Turkish non-financial companies in overseas currencies.
Each 1 cent depreciation in the currency adds about 5 billion liras to the cost
of Turkey’s foreign borrowings, it said.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

As Gaza sinks into desperation, a new
book makes the case against Israeli brutality.

ISRAEL CELEBRATES a double anniversary
on May 15 this year, the founding of the state and the formal establishment of
the Israeli Defense Forces, the name the state gave to its combined army, navy,
and air force. Armed statehood fulfilled the political Zionists’ dream of
gathering Jews from the ancient Diaspora under their own government in what
they declared to be their “promised land.”

During the battle over the land between 1947 and 1949, the IDF expelled
three-quarters of the indigenous population. Of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs
who fled, 250,000 took shelter in Gaza, a tiny pocket of southwest Palestine
then occupied by the Egyptian army. The destitute and traumatized refugees were
three times more numerous than the 80,000 Gazans who took them in.

The United Nations passed but did not
enforce annual resolutions calling for the refugees’ return. Israel invaded the
territory in 1956, withdrew under American pressure in 1957, and invaded again
in 1967. As its population grew to nearly 2 million souls packed into a pocket
five miles wide and 40 miles long, Gaza has become a byword for misery. Former
British Prime Minister David Cameron, no advocate of the Palestinian cause,
called it “an open-air prison.”

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Jakarta (CNN): A husband and wife used
their four children in a string of deadly suicide attacks on three churches in
the Indonesian city of Surabaya that left 12 people dead, according to the
country's ranking police official.

The family included two daughters, aged 9 and 12 years old, said Head
Gen. Tito Karnavian. The young girls were present when their mother detonated
one of the bombs, and the couple's two teenage sons carried out a separate
attack on another church.

Earlier reports indicated at least 10
people died in the Sunday morning attacks, but Karnavian said during a news
conference that 12 victims were killed. Forty-one people, including two police
officers, were hospitalized with injuries, police spokesman Frans Barung
Mangera said previously.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

The U.S. marks the opening of its
embassy to Israel in Jerusalem with a large ceremony Monday. In physical terms,
it's just a move of the ambassador and some staff from Tel Aviv to a large
consular building that already exists.

But it carries political significance that's reverberating around an
already-tense Middle East: After decades of U.S. policy saying the status of
the disputed city should be settled in peace talks between Israelis and
Palestinians, the Trump administration is now saying the city is Israel's
capital.

It puts the U.S. in a distinct world
minority. The U.N. General Assembly, by a vote of 128 to 9, condemned the move
last December. Most of the world's governments do not recognize the city as
either Israel's or as the Palestinians'.

Monday, May 14, 2018

One of the worst possible outcomes for
the U.S. economy, and ultimately for investors, is stagflation. Of course, if
you weren’t around in the 60-70’s, there is a reasonably high probability you
are not even sure what “stagflation” is.

Here is the technical definition: “stagflation – persistent high
inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand in a country’s
economy.” How can that happen? Exactly in the way you are witnessing now.

While the current Administration is
keen on equalizing trade through tariffs, trade deals, and trade deficit
reduction, they have also embarked on a deficit expanding spending spree which
has deleterious long-term effects on economic growth. At the same time, the
administration is attacking our major trading partners, particularly China,
leading to a push to shift away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Good evening. Tonight, we’re going to
show you something that the world has never seen before. Tonight, we are going
to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that
Iran has been hiding for years from the international community in its secret
atomic archive.

We’re going to show you Iran’s secret
nuclear files. You may well know that Iran’s leaders
repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons. You can listen to Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei: “I stress that the Islamic Republic has never been after
nuclear weapons.”

You can listen to Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani: “Nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s security
and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical
convictions.” This is repeated by Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif: “We
didn’t have any program to develop nuclear weapons. Anyway, we consider nuclear
weapons both irrational as well as immoral.”

Thursday, May 3, 2018

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy
say they have successfully tested a new type of nuclear reactor that could one
day provide juice to colonies on other worlds. The reactor can power several
homes and appears able to operate in harsh environments.

Getting electricity in space is always a problem. Close to Earth,
satellites and astronauts can use solar panels. But farther out, the sun's
light dims, making it exponentially harder to get the power needed to run
communications, scientific instruments and, in the case of astronauts, life
support.

The best solution is good old-fashioned
nuclear power. Nukes have fueled everything from NASA's Pluto probe to the
Curiosity rover on Mars. Nuclear power sources are durable, and they can last a
long time. The two Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, are still phoning home
using power from a a few pounds of plutonium they carry with them.